A salad I recently made that had me individually grilling a heap of mandolined courgette slices for half an hour while the shrieking smoke alarm provided a sound track that matched my ever-darkening mood? Not so much…

Strawberry-lemon sorbet scores off the charts on the effort to result ratio. Five minutes’ work for a hot-pink, ice-cold, sweet-tart sorbet you’d be happy to eat any day of the year.

And there’s something about blitzing up the whole lemon that is deeply satisfying to me. Continue reading →

Peaches and basil both say “summer” to me – and in this peach-basil sorbet they can say it together…

I made this sorbet with those little flat white peaches that have been appearing in the shops the last few years. The lovely rosy colour was a pleasant surprise – the result of leaving the skins on the peaches when I puréed them. Continue reading →

I made this chocolate-raspberry ice cream for the first time other day. It certainly won’t be the last – all four of us were completely wowed by it.

The recipe couldn’t have been easier. Four basic ingredients – cream, chocolate, sugar, raspberries. And being a Philadelphia-style ice cream, there was no messing about with egg yolks and custard. Continue reading →

Rhubarb crumble ice cream is an inspired idea – tart rhubarb, silky sweet cream, nuggets of cakey crumble. It’s not the most visually seductive of ice creams, at least when made with the chunky green stalks of rhubarb from my garden patch. None of that delicate pink forced rhubarb for us.